Housekeeping

This is my 500^th blog entry.

I thought I’d use the occasion to remark on and review a few things.

I hope the readers of this blog have found the entries interesting, any maybe even useful. Feel free to leave a comment on what you like and don’t like. I don’t promise I’ll do what you suggest, but I will take it under consideration, and seriously.

(Legal training makes you the same way—when you are the one who signs the legal brief, you have to agree with it, even if somebody else helped you write it. In the end, you are the one responsible. So, while I value advice, I can never promise that I will necessarily follow it.)

First, a few particulars on how I have the blog set up.

In regards to comments, I have it set up so that the very first time somebody comments, I moderate it. That keeps out a lot of crap. It also means that if you are a first-time commenter, there will be a delay before your comment appears until I see and approve the comment. But after that, if you’ve commented before, your comment will go right through (that assumes that you use the same username/email address/URL.)

Another choice I had to make was whether to have the entire blog entry appear on the home page, or whether to write a short teaser so that, if you are interested, you have to click through to the actual entry.

The advantage to the way I am currently doing it is that it is then fairly easy to scroll down to see the last 10 entries, and what they were about. It is also rather fun to try to write a teaser that draws people to click on “Continue Reading”.

So, what do folks think about the current way of doing things?

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Something I really rather enjoy (and I hope you do too), is coming up with Subject lines for my entries. Sometimes, they are really just mundane (like the earlier “Lost”). But other times I really like what I’ve come up with. Some I’ve particularly enjoyed:

• The Sickle of Life about the hawk that got the house finch.

• Gag Reflexology about the ridiculousness of ancient reflexology.

• This is Your Brain on Clogs on brain plasticity.

• Escarpment Escapement on hiking
  along an escarpment (and trying to get over the top).

• Cardinals Rule, just a few photos of cardinals.

• Dipping A Toe in Your Ria, an absolutely terrible pun (on dipping your toe in the water, and how urea really helps the skin from cracking).

• HuffPo HuffPoo. Now who couldn’t like such a title on such ridiculousness?

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Another thing that WordPress does for me is give me traffic counts. I just haven’t figured out what draws traffic to my blog. One thing that works pretty well is to mention somebody famous. My entry on Serena Williams injuring her foot still gets quite a few hits. Anything about Dual Survival does too, particularly on days when reruns are being shown. In fact, my all time most popular blog entry is Cody Lundin in “Dual Survival”, with over 37,000 hits.

But then there are other entries that I think are sure-fire winners, and they plop. On other days, I’ll be desperate to come up with something, so I’ll just throw something out there. And it turns into a ratings bonanza. You just never know.

I think my readers have noticed that I’ve started to take Sundays off (hey, you try coming up with a new blog entry day after day!). Sunday traffic has plummeted as folks don’t even bother looking at the site. (Seriously, that’s OK. But, devious me, some day I’ll post on Sunday just to fool you. ).

One final item: if any of you would like guest blog occasionally, let me know. We can set it up.

Regardless, I find I still have things to say (and things keep happening to me), and I appreciate and thank those of you who stick with me.

Cheerio!

 

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